A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania

By Patrick M. Erben

In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. Patrick Erben challenges the long-standing historical myth--first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin--that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. He deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the radical English and German Protestants who founded the "holy experiment." Their belief in hidden yet persistent links between human language and the word of God impelled their vision of a common spiritual idiom. Translation became the search for underlying correspondences between diverse human expressions of the divine and served as a model for reconciliation and inclusiveness.
Drawing on German and English archival sources, Erben examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn's translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius's multilingual poetics, Ephrata's "angelic" singing and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians' polyglot missions, and the common language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. By revealing a mystical quest for unity, Erben presents a compelling counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780807838198

Patrick M. Erben

Patrick M. Erben is associate professor of English at the University of West Georgia.

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Editorial Note

Unless otherwise noted, translations are by the author. Usually, German and other non-English quotations are supplied in the footnotes. Occasionally, I provide short portions of the original in parentheses in the main text when the analysis directly concerns semantic differences. In my translations, I strove to represent as much as possible the meaning of the original, even if that sometimes meant changing the wording slightly. Like the translators I study in this book, my method of translation stresses felicity to the spirit rather than to the letter.

My transcription of original source material (in manuscript and print) generally follows the approach laid out in Mary-Jo Kline and Susan Holbrook Perdue, A Guide to Documentary Editing, 3d ed. (Charlottesville, Va., 2008); thus, I have kept editorial changes and intrusions to a minimum and retained most spelling errors or idiosyncrasies of early modern German and English orthography, except in cases where they would have confused the meaning. I have made several changes to adapt the original material to modern typography and to create greater ease of reading. I always changed the long s common in both English and German to the modern s.

The differences between the German handwriting and Fraktur printing (also known as Gothic type) and modern roman handwriting and type (used in both English and German) are significant and required several changes in the transcription process. In some fonts, the umlaut is represented by a small e printed above the vowel; this is changed to the modern way of representing the umlaut (which was already used by many printers in the early modern period). In German print and handwriting, double consonants were sometimes designated by a straight line above one consonant; this was used to save space (especially in manuscript) and is changed here to the double consonant. German variant spellings of English proper names and terms are retained in the footnotes, for example, Pensilvania or Pennsilvania for Pennsylvania. I also changed some punctuation to adhere more to present conventions and thus avoid potential misunderstandings. For example, the virgule (/) was frequently used in the place where modern German punctuation uses a comma (especially in titles); I replaced all with commas (and occasionally semicolons or periods). Also, I changed all double hyphens (=) to single hyphens (-).

Early modern German handwriting is notoriously difficult to decipher for current readers. Whenever I was in doubt about the particular spelling but could decipher the word, I abided by modern conventions or made the spelling consistent with usages by the same author elsewhere in the manuscript source. In the footnotes, German and other foreign-language titles follow modern bibliographical conventions.

Introduction

Unter der Leitung seines Geistes

SPIRITUAL TRANSLATION IN EARLY AMERICA

In a manuscript report written in 1819, Moravian missionary John Heckewelder (1743–1823) outlined a controversy among Moravian missionaries about which translation of the passion story from the Gospel of John should be used in the field: the translation by the late David Zeisberger (1721–1808) or a more recent one by Christian Frederick Dencke (1775–1838), who had criticized Zeisberger’s translations for inaccuracies in the Delaware language. Heckewelder had sent a circular letter to all missionaries and then summarized the responses. Heckewelder and his respondents credited Zeisberger with nothing less than the discovery of spiritual correspondences between the German and Delaware languages. Missionary Johannes Renatus Schmidt (1784–1852), for instance, argued that Zeisberger’s work was created with much prayer and pleading to God, and under the guidance of his spirit. Much like the ancient translators of the Septuagint claimed divine inspiration in translating the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek, Zeisberger’s followers asserted a similar rationale for a linguist they termed the first, the best translator. These and other responses harked back to seventeenth-century linguistic projects such as Jan Amos Comenius’s attempts to create a universal language (panglottia) and the Rosicrucian claim to have discovered a new language. Heckewelder and other missionaries believed that Zeisberger had tapped into or even created a pure, spiritual language. In a new nation increasingly seeking to remove native Americans west of the Mississippi, Moravian missionaries such as Zeisberger and Heckewelder pursued a utopian program of linguistic and religious community building with and among Indian groups like the Delawares; crucially, their vision relied on early modern theories of linguistic and spiritual correspondences facilitated through translation.¹

Esoteric, mystical, and utopian visions of reestablishing unity and peace for humankind have enjoyed renewed currency throughout history, especially in moments of conflict and war. The Neoplatonist idealism that informed seventeenth-century religious and linguistic reformers, as well as the Moravians’ dream of building spiritual community among the North American Indians, reemerged during periods otherwise marked by utilitarian, empiricist, or even relativistic approaches to language and the relationship between culturally and ethnically different groups. In the turbulent environment of post–World War I Germany, the philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and translator Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) pursued a similarly utopian vision of language and translation. In his 1923 essay The Task of the Translator, Benjamin formulated his concept of pure language, grounded in Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. Kabbalist language theory sought to uncover mystical connections between all languages and an original, holy tongue. For Benjamin, this relatedness or kinship resided in the intention underlying each language as a whole—an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language. The task of the translator was to integrate multiple tongues into one true language. Benjamin found this pure language concealed in concentrated fashion in translations. Although translation theory usually distinguishes between original and translation, Benjamin compared both sides to fragments [that] are part of a vessel—equally significant pieces of a broken and scattered whole. Just as the goal of mystical union is a losing of the self through oneness with God, Benjamin saw as the goal of translation the collapse of signifier and signified and thus the end of language itself.²

Although seemingly out of step with twentieth-century linguistics, Benjamin’s mystical concept of translation has been reapplied by translation theorist Lawrence Venuti. Short of using Benjamin’s concept of pure language, Venuti ascribes to translation the utopian agency of creating intelligibilities or understandings between foreign and domestic texts and readers, thus imagining community between both: The domestic inscription is made with the very intention to communicate the foreign text, and so it is filled with the anticipation that a community will be created around that text—although in translation .... In supplying an ideological resolution, a translation projects a utopian community that is not yet realized. Whether, like Benjamin, one alleges an a priori bond between languages or, like Venuti, hopes to establish such kinship, the goal of translation might be a utopian harmony between languages, cultures, and peoples—the creation of a spiritual language engendering community.³

Benjamin’s and Venuti’s concepts closely reflect the efficacy that many early Americans ascribed to the practice of translation and the work of the translator in creating actual and spiritual communities from the fragmented cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups gathering in the New World, specifically during the founding and settlement of colonial Pennsylvania. For his own context—the moral and political confusion of Europe between World Wars I and II—Benjamin deployed mystical, early modern concepts of translation in the hope of knitting a web of kinship between hostile peoples. Similarly, early Americans harnessed seventeenth-century ideas about language, translation, and community to confront seemingly insurmountable differences among races, ethnicities, languages, religions, and cultures. This desire to wield translation as a utopian tool is nowhere more evident than in the writings of Moravian missionaries to the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians, who had been dispersed and decimated by imperial and early national removal policies, land grabbing, and racial vilification. The ability of translators to rediscover and build a common, spiritual language for Euro-American and native American people alike reveals a persistent impulse in early America: the utopian desire to use translation and multilingual communication as potent tools for distilling a common spiritual idiom from the multiplicities of languages, faiths, and cultures.

Such utopian notions of translation, of course, gloss over the parallel process of colonizing native American spirituality and language with Euro-Christian signifiers. Moravian missionaries used translation in preaching and hymn singing to shape a spiritual and communal reality among native American communities and, in doing so, altered indigenous thought patterns and cosmologies. Although this interpretation is more in line with postcolonial theory, early modern people such as the Moravians were far from sharing a postmodern constructivist notion of language. Instead, many early Americans held a persistent belief in the correspondence between linguistic and spiritual systems built upon a language of a higher order, which might then be harnessed to create shared understanding between disparate groups and individuals on a concrete social and communal level.⁴

Heckewelder’s report, for example, described in painstaking detail not only other missionaries’ observations of Zeisberger’s process of translation but also the functions of his translations in the personal and communal lives of Moravian Indians. According to Heckewelder’s summary of Schmidt’s response, the Indian helper Jacob (a bilingual Moravian Indian assisting missionaries and translators) explained the difference between understanding the words and the sense of a translation. Citing Jacob’s words verbatim (albeit with parenthetical insertions presumably clarifying his meaning), Heckewelder wrote in his report:

When an Indian says: I don’t understand it (such as something that was read or preached, etc.), it is not to be understood as if he meant the Words, but the true Sense—(the Spiritual Sense)—for he [Jacob] said the following about Br. David’s translations: "that the mistakes that occur in them only consist of endings in some words, otherwise everything was in good Indian, and is mostly being understood, even if not everything."

Although Schmidt’s and Heckewelder’s mediation complicates the interpretation of Jacob’s words, Indian converts seemed to appreciate and comprehend Zeisberger’s emphasis on building spiritual and cultural bridges through his translations, thus dispensing with excessive literalism or perfect grammatical equivalence. According to Jacob, Zeisberger’s translations looked beyond mere words and grammatical structures to conveying spiritual meanings. Although Jacob and other native American converts had encountered the Christian gospel for the first time through Zeisberger’s translations and thus equated their verbal quality with the Word of God, Jacob’s bilingual abilities and his claim that Zeisberger had written everything in good Indian supports the idea that translation rediscovered hidden spiritual correspondences and thus forged a unified language from previously scattered fragments.⁵

Even more telling is the reaction of Indian converts to attempts at improving Zeisberger’s hymn translations, known to many Indians by heart. In a meeting, Heckewelder reported, the Indian Johannes Papunhank exclaimed: "‘Brothers! Do not ruin our beautiful verses! Let us quit doing this! Whenever I sing, pray, or just quietly think about these verses, I feel close to the savior in my heart! Yeah, I even yearn for this when I am feeding the cows in my barn.’" Papunhank’s pious expression was certainly domesticated to a degree that made him almost indistinguishable from a Pennsylvania German farmer whose faith, ideally, pervaded his most mundane activities. For eighteenth-century Pietists such as the Moravians, the homely image evoked in Papunhank’s description confirmed their belief that true faith could only be found through a religion of the heart and a personal relationship to Christ.⁶

Moravian Christianity and its peculiar language appealed to Delaware Indians like Papunhank because it resembled a native American spirituality that did not confine religious experience to standardized, institutionalized, and abstract moments of worship but located the numinous in daily activities and even interactions with the animal world. Heckewelder’s underscore of feeding the cows demonstrates that he considered this connection between daily reality and spirituality convincing evidence of Papunhank’s sincerity. The closeness to the savior Papunhank allegedly felt in singing Zeisberger’s hymns was for Heckewelder indicative of a spiritual language that reunited signifier and signified in a mystical union and ultimately dispensed with the need for human language altogether. Thus, Zeisberger’s verses—a union of Delaware Indian words and Moravian Christian ideas—had the same effect when Papunhank thought of them silently and quietly completed his chores. Translation served as the catalyst of Papunhank’s brand of heart religion and was thus elevated to the status of pure language. The spirit Zeisberger invoked during the translation process and apparently inculcated in the product was believed to move readers or singers closer to God.

The mystical enthusiasm in Heckewelder’s report does not discredit this type of evidence; rather, it provides a window into the personal and communal meanings of translation in a religious context. Such moments of language mysticism allow current readers to glimpse a widespread faith in spiritual translation in the writings of German and English radical Protestants in colonial Pennsylvania. Like linguistic, religious, and educational reformers in seventeenth-century Europe, radical Protestants in early America believed that linguistic differences were largely the result of a breech between God and mankind; translation was thus the process of either rediscovering hidden links or establishing new ones between the divine logos and human language and between speakers of different languages, ultimately resulting in the creation of a spiritual language. Early Americans and European observers often employed the metaphor of America as a new Babel to express their exasperation over the confusing multiplicity of languages, religions, cultures, ethnicities, and races; behind the metaphor lay frequent investments in the construction of communities as antidotes to the heritage of Babel.⁷

English Quaker and German radical Pietist immigrants, in particular, regarded translation as one of the most potent tools for rediscovering underlying connections between different languages and faiths. Instead of a liability, religious and linguistic difference in early America constituted the perfect mission field for a utopian project of reconnecting the divine Word of God and the fallen word of human language. Throughout the colonial period, many European immigrants and settlers believed in hidden and unseen links between human beings, between the Bible and the book of nature, between human languages purportedly confused at Babel, and between human language and the divine logos. These beliefs had a profound impact on the textual construction of Pennsylvania in promotional literature and on debates about communal cohesion and conflict throughout the colonial period. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourses of community in colonial America were thus shaped by a range of Neoplatonist, esoteric ideas and questions: the relationship between human language and inspired speech, alchemical experiments and mystical notions of divine signatures, and a variety of secretive, hermetic, pansophist, and utopian experiments in early modern Europe.⁸

In fact, esoteric speculations and utopian visions for a universal reformation of human affairs—especially of human language, communication, and knowledge—prospered precisely in those places where the most pressing issues of early Euro-American society were being debated, such as the heterogeneous religious, ethnic, and linguistic environment of colonial Pennsylvania. Seventeenth-century European theories about the origin and designs for the reform of human language flowered among individuals and groups who attempted to reconcile a continued belief in mystically inspired language with an Augustinian desire to create community among different Christian denominations and among heathen converts in native American missions. Common to these impulses was the attempt to counter the effects of Babel by gaining access to a spiritually fulfilled language and by teasing out convergences among different languages and beliefs. This spiritual language, however, was not identical with the universal, new, perfect, or original languages sought after by early modern linguists in Europe. Rather, in the multilingual and heterodox environment of early America, radical Protestants such as English Quakers and German Pietists sought a common spiritual language in the interstices of mystical experiences of the divine and their human expressions. Translation, therefore, became the search for correspondences between spiritual ideals rather than perfect linguistic or doctrinal agreement.

At the center of this search lay similar notions about a commensurability of language, meaning, and interpretation. For many early modern Europeans and early Americans, language was both fallible and at the same time able to convey divine essences. As all existing human languages seemed equally flawed in communicating divine knowledge and experiences, linguistic diversity presented no exacerbation or exceptionally severe case. In fact, translation and multilingualism offered solutions for the problem per se. Translators or multilingual individuals understood the fallacy of equating human language with divine truth. Translation asked readers to confront the fallibility of the linguistic signifier and to search for the permanence of the divine referent or signified. Whereas translators were intimately acquainted with this task, others needed to learn it. Communication about spiritual things always depended on the spiritual state of both writers and readers.

During religious and political disputes such as the Keithian controversy in Pennsylvania during the 1690s and the debates over war and defense during the 1740s–1760s, a common pursuit of divine essences, however, seemed to yield to a Babel-like confusion. Yet, the desire to find spiritual unity in the face of seemingly insurmountable differences inspired translators and other multilingual individuals or groups. In the writings of the diverse people of early Pennsylvania, moments emerge when difference did not disappear but rather became normal, acceptable, or even useful. Indeed, translation in Pennsylvania was so pervasive that people promoted it and took it for granted. Most definitely, it was not the exception. Between undeniable periods of conflict and confusion, Pennsylvanians (or early Americans more broadly speaking) experienced moments when a constant state of being in translation resulted in the gift of community. Such subjective moments did not exist among all Pennsylvanians or become the rule. Often, only textual expressions of the hope to reach such a state remain. This book invites current readers to imagine—as many early Pennsylvanians did—that from the multiplicity of voices in translation or communal singing rose a common language of the spirit.

INVESTIGATING EARLY MODERN pursuits of spiritual and linguistic harmony requires several theoretical and methodological adjustments. Most important, the visions of the radical Protestants who established colonial Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries contradict commonplace assumptions about the advent and spread of Enlightenment ideologies in the Atlantic world. Rather than constituting a waning, exclusively Old World mentality, mystical, radical Protestant, and Neoplatonist concepts of language and community formation in America prospered and thus existed in dynamic tension with Enlightenment empiricism. English and German radical Protestants transferred to the New World pervasive early modern beliefs in the impact of hidden and invisible correspondences (between people, languages, substances, and so forth) on visible and concrete social, political, and religious formations—such as the founding of Pennsylvania as a holy experiment. A dominant historiographic focus on the transmission of Lockean liberalism and its flowering in the American Revolution has subordinated the great diversity of linguistic, religious, and intellectual exchanges in the colonial period to the seemingly inevitable ascendency of British language, culture, and imperialism. Recentering the translation and multilingual dissemination of utopian, esoteric, and other Neoplatonist visions of linguistic and communal reform dislodges this prevailing Anglocentrism and shifts attention away from empire studies as a hegemonic lens for understanding the early modern Atlantic world. An inquiry into linguistic and religious utopianism recovers the movement and textual communication of seemingly marginal groups such as German radical Pietists and appreciates their visions as formative for discourses and models of community. Esoteric and utopian notions of linguistic and spiritual community served as alternative approaches to specifically eighteenth-century challenges such as the spread of imperial rivalry and warfare, which threatened earlier visions of a Philadelphian experiment.⁹

This book takes seriously the manifold expressions of a desire for mystical union among early modern people who pinned their hopes for reform or transcendence self-consciously onto esoteric planes of understanding. Historicity, in this case, means carefully reconstructing the seemingly foreign epistemologies of those immigrants who carried with them from Europe ideas of the correspondence, transformation, and perfection of human beings, languages, substances, and even communities. Their visions were deeply rooted in ancient and medieval cosmologies that had been adapted by widely popular thinkers like Jan Amos Comenius and Jacob Boehme to seventeenth-century challenges such as warfare, the alleged sterility of institutionalized religion, and the rise of secular epistemologies. Granted, many people in early America thought of linguistic multiplicity as an obstacle and used translation as a means to a practical end. Yet the archival record is brimming with the utopian desire that translation—not unlike the process of metallurgic purification pursued by alchemy—could transform the multiplicity of voices in America into a single, purer language and into a more coherent and peaceful society. Iconic translations or moments of translingual and interdenominational exchange exemplified the hope that a common spiritual language could once again unite disparate human communities and humanity with God. For these groups, visions of spiritual and linguistic unity facilitated through translation offered the solution to conflict and division.

Early Americans deployed visible tools of textual and oral communication to create or discover invisible communal bonds. Literary strategies—especially translation, manuscript exchange, and multilingual singing—were believed to reveal underlying spiritual connections between individuals and disparate groups, thus serving as textual coagulants for actual communities. Writers, editors, and translators used prefaces, letters, inscriptions in printed matter, and other types of framing devices to shape the meanings of the production, circulation, and reception of translation among writers and readers in early Pennsylvania. Translating divine truths or ideals from one language into another, done right, could reveal and even create a common spiritual language. Done wrong, it might plunge communities deeper into a Babylonian abyss.

In disciplinary terms, this book stands between literary and historical methodologies and assumptions. Texts are not just referents to a nontextual world of ideas or social forces but are also powerful projections of an unseen reality. In a world concerned with the efficacy of language in forging spiritual bonds, texts were of primary importance. My methodology thus necessitates longer quotations as well as more extensive interpretive passages or close readings. German-language quotations have been placed in the footnotes for the convenience of an Anglophone readership, although I remain ambivalent about the implications of such a submersion. I invite readers to peruse these selections and compare them to my translations, searching for alternate interpretations. I hope my own interaction with my readers will thus mimic the continual practice of translation, scrutiny, and debate across linguistic and spiritual differences practiced by the people and texts I study.¹⁰

Pennsylvania, more than any other province, reveals the ideas about linguistic and spiritual multiplicity and convergence that radical Protestant immigrants brought across the Atlantic and adapted to conditions found in the New World. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany and England, ideas about linguistic and religious renewal developed interdependently. The translation and circulation of Neoplatonist thought concerning the effects of Babel and the rediscovery of a divinely inspired language engendered a broad enthusiasm to create Pennsylvania as a Philadelphian community characterized by translingual and interdenominational unity. From this impulse arose a promotional literature that described Pennsylvania (circa 1680–1700) as a translingual and Philadelphian projection of the social, communal, and linguistic reordering of human affairs in the New World. Promoters cast the new province as an antidote to the moral degeneration of Europe. The Keithian controversy and its aftermath (circa 1690s–1700s) constituted a crisis of trust in the capacity to establish a harmonious society from disparate parts. Both sides in the controversy accused one another of suppressing the testimony and conscience of the opposing party, thus highlighting the attempt to unify both individual and communal expressions of faith in a single, yet normative and even oppressive language. The multilingual manuscript writings of German immigrant leader and polymath Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1719), on the other hand, demonstrated that a common spiritual language could be forged only by reconciling—rather than suppressing—disparate languages of the divine as well as different human voices. Specific strategies—such as multilingual hymnody and translingual manuscript exchange—amplified personal affection as well as individual visions of divine unity to a larger level.

By midcentury, external pressures of war and calls for defense threatened to dislodge earlier alliances between radical Protestant groups. Suddenly, imperialist and Anglocentric languages of communal construction eroded previously held concepts of translingual and ecumenical unity. At the same time, such pressures reinvigorated a common sense of persecution and a stance of spiritual—even physical—martyrdom among the various peace sects who had constituted the first groups to immigrate to Pennsylvania, including Quakers, radical Pietists, Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, and Moravians. A radical Pietist group arriving in Pennsylvania from the 1740s onward, the Moravians (or Renewed Unitas Fratrum) were compelled primarily by a universalist missionary agenda that sought to generate a global, Christocentric community through the translation of scripture, hymns, and other key texts into a multiplicity of indigenous languages. Throughout the eighteenth century, Moravian missionaries and linguists applied the Neoplatonist and Augustinian search for a common spiritual idiom popularized in the seventeenth century by Jan Amos Comenius (last bishop of the former Unitas Fratrum or United Brethren) to their linguistic work, especially to the translation of hymnody and the compilation of vocabularies and grammars for native American mission congregations. Similar to Quakers and German peace sects during the French and Indian War, Moravians continued to oppose war and the linguistic and racial exclusiveness of the rising American nation through a persistent search for a pure, spiritual language.

The translingual readings in this book open access to a larger movement in early America and across the Atlantic: the formation of spiritually coherent communities through translation and other cross-cultural forms of communication. Transatlantic communication networks—specifically situated in the international migration of German Pietist groups such as the Moravians and the mission activities sponsored by the Franckesche Stiftungen (August Hermann Francke’s center of learning and social welfare in Halle)—facilitated personal relationships, promoted shared religious sensibilities, and even sponsored common practical pursuits (such as the trade in medicine), thus transcending cultural and geographical divisions.¹¹

This book’s focus on translation proffers a radically different image of early American history, culture, and social experience. In particular, an analysis of pervasive translingual relationships, communication, and communal discourses dispels the simplistic dialectic between assimilation and ethnic isolationism that has dominated immigration history. Scholarship as well as popular opinion about the history and impact of polyphonic and multiethnic immigration has perpetuated the xenophobic fears and assumptions underlying Benjamin Franklin’s warnings against German settlers and German cultural influence in the 1750s and 1760s. Only recently, historians have begun to examine a variety of modulations in the interaction between different European settler communities—English and non-English—as well as native Americans in the North American colonies. By attending to the role of translation in creating communal ideals in early America, this book interferes with the cultural and political myth that language diversity poses a fundamental threat to communal coherence—both in colonial America and today. Translation assumed a central role in early American society because it reflected the daily interaction with difference while simultaneously providing a potent trope for the highest-order goal of repairing human divisions by discovering a common spiritual language.¹²

A harmony of the spirits emerged whenever early Americans abandoned a normative or exclusive language, position, or idea and began to explore correspondences between seemingly irreconcilable positions. This book uncovers a web of translingual and intercultural exchanges—both as utopian ideal and as concrete reality—among German, English, and native American residents that was spurred by the explicit desire to construct communities based on common ideals rather than linguistic and cultural exclusiveness. The individuals and groups depicted in the following chapters faced and sometimes overcame their fear of difference by continually translating between languages, sensibilities, and ideas in the hope of speaking like one another and thus speaking the language of God. Above all, readers, writers, and translators did not think of linguistic multiplicity as a curse but rather as an opportunity for overcoming spiritual divisions. Although theirs was not a proto-multicultural ideology that considered difference intrinsically valuable, they nevertheless believed that unity could be achieved by finding hidden, underlying congruencies between a diversity of human expressions, faiths, and languages. I invite current readers to retrain their vision and read like the many radical visionaries who hoped to realize in America their hope for a linguistically and spiritually unified society: with an eye for the unseen links tying together a multiplicity of human languages and expressions.¹³

Notes

1. John Heckewelder, Pro memoria; an Br. Seidel gerichtet, nach belieben zu gebrauchen [Comments on translation of passion story from Gospel of John by Zeisberger and Dencke], May 9, 1819, box 333, folder 7, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem (mit Gebet u. Flehen zu Gott, und unter der Leitung seines Geistes; "der erste [der beste] Übersezer [sic]). On the relationship between linguistics, ethnography, and Indian policy in the early Republic, see Sean P. Harvey, American Languages: Indians, Ethnology, and the Empire for Liberty" (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2009).

2. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens," trans. Harry Zohn, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (London, 2000), 15–23 (quotations on 15, 20, 21); Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 236–237; George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1992), 63.

3. Lawrence Venuti, Translation, Community, Utopia, in Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 485. Also see Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London, 1998); Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London, 1995).

4. Lawrence Venuti, Introduction, in Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 6.

5. Heckewelder, Pro memoria, box 333, folder 7, Moravian Archives. In this passage, Hecke-welder quotes Schmidt quoting Jacob; nevertheless, Jacob’s presumed words are interspersed with Schmidt’s third-person perspective and commentary, mostly in parentheses: "Wenn ein Indianer sagt: ich verstehe es nicht (neml. dasjenige was vorgelesen,—geprediget, u.s.w. worden,) so ist es gar nicht so zu verstehen, als meynete er darunter die Worte, sondern den wahren Sinn—(den Geistlichen Sinn)—denn äußerte er [Jacob] sich über br. David seine Übersetzungen also: ‘daß die fehler die in denselben vorkämen, blos in Endungen mancher Wörter bestünden, sonst sey alles gut Indianisch, und wird mehrentheils verstanden, wenn auch nicht alles.’"

6. Ibid.: "Brüder! verderbt uns unsere schönen Verse nicht! Lasset uns aufhören damit! Allemal wenn ich diese Verse singe—bete, oder nur in der stille betrachte, so fühle ich die Nähe des Heylandes in meinem Herzen! Ja so gar ersehne ich dieses wenn ich in meinem Stall ans Kühe füttern bin!" On Pietism in general and radical Pietism in particular, see Erich Beyreuther, Geschichte des Pietismus (Stuttgart, 1978); Hans Schneider, Der radikale Pietismus im 17. Jahrhundert, in Martin Brecht, ed., Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. I of Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen, 1993), 391–437; Schneider, Der radikale Pietismus im 18. Jahrhundert, Brecht and Klaus Deppermann, ed., Der Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. II of Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen, 1995), 107–197; Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus, Die Kirche in ihrer Geschichte: ein Handbuch, ed. Bernd Moeller, IV (Göttingen, 1990). On Pietist immigration to Pennsylvania, see Klaus Deppermann, Pennsylvanien als Asyl des frühen deutschen Pietismus, Pietismus und Neuzeit, X (1984), 190–226; A. Gregg Roeber, Der Pietismus in Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert, in Brecht and Deppermann, eds., Der Pietismus, 666–699.

7. With the exception of Edward G. Gray’s New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton, N.J., 1999), most scholars who use the Babel trope, including Randall Balmer, James Axtell, and Marc Shell, neglect to explore what linguistic difference and the Babel story in particular meant to European immigrants, especially in religious terms. See Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York, 1989); Axtell, Babel of Tongues: Communicating with the Indians in Eastern North America, in Gray and Norman Fiering, eds., The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800 (New York, 2000); Shell, American Babel: Literature of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

8. A growing body of work traces the transatlantic or circum-Atlantic transmission of mystical and esoteric, alchemical, and pansophist theories and ideas and examines their impact on early American sensibilities, intellectual movements, and social experiments. As Phillippe Rosenberg has shown with regard to the late-seventeenth-century Quaker antislavery movement, seemingly retrospective intellectual forces could yield surprisingly progressive social results; see Rosenberg, Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., LXI (2004), 609–642. Specifically, I share with Rosenberg an interest in the influence of early-seventeenth-century German mystic Jacob Boehme on German and English radical Protestantism and, by extension, New World communal experiments. For other work uncovering the impact of early modern mysticism, esotericism, alchemy, pansophism, and early modern science on Atlantic world ideas and discourses, see Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn., 2007); Ralph Bauer, A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic World, in James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (London, 2007), 99–126; Bauer, The Snake in the Garden: The Esoteric Hermeneutics of Discovery in the Early Modern Atlantic World (work in progress); John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge, 1996); Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore, 2005); Sarah Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011); Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010). Much work is being done by historians of science, religion, and medicine in early modern Europe, but I am here primarily concerned with scholarship that has a specifically transatlantic and early American dimension as well as a focus on language.

9. For scholarship privileging a master narrative of the unfolding of Enlightenment, Lockean liberalism, and Whig political theory from the late seventeenth century to the American Revolution and the rise of the U.S. nation-state, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992). In American literary studies, even the revisionist criticism of the 1990s and 2000s has largely retained an emphasis on English cultural origins. See, for example, Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner, eds., The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800 (New York, 1997); William C. Spengemann, A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1994); Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling British: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, N.J., 2007). For examples of Atlantic world history as imperial history, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2002); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2007); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford, 2009).

10. On the intersections between literary interpretation and historicism, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), vii.

11. For scholarship focusing on transatlantic communication networks, see Rosalind J. Beiler, Bridging the Gap: Cultural Mediators and the Structure of Transatlantic Communication, in Norbert Finzsch and Ursula Lehmkuhl, eds., Atlantic Communications: The Media in American and German History from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004), 45–64; Beiler, Distributing Aid to Believers in Need: The Religious Foundations of Transatlantic Migration, Empire, Society, Labor: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Dunn, special issue, Pennsylvania History, LXIV (1997), 73–87; Beiler, From the Rhine to the Delaware Valley: The Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Trading Channels of Caspar Wistar, in Hartmut Lehmann, Herrmann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson, eds., In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America (University Park, Pa., 2000), 172–188; Beiler, German-Speaking Immigrants in the British Atlantic World, 1680–1730, OAH Magazine of History, XVIII, no. 3 (April 2004), 19–22; Beiler, Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750 (University Park, Pa., 2008); Michele Gillespie and Robert Beachy, Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World (Oxford, 2007); Mark Häberlein, The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730–1820 (University Park, Pa., 2009); Sabine Heerwart and Claudia Schnurmann, eds., Atlantic Migrations: Regions and Movements in Germany and North America/USA during the 18th and 19th Century (Hamburg, 2007); Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten: Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanisch-atlantischen Raum, 1648–1713 (Cologne, 1998); Schnurmann and Lehmann, eds., Atlantic Understandings: Essays on European and American History in Honor of Hermann Wellenreuther (Hamburg, 2006); Wilson, Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-Century North America (University Park, Pa., 2000); Wellenreuther, Continental-European Scholarship on Early Modern North American and North Atlantic World: A Report, Early American Studies, II (2004), 452–478; Finzsch and Wellenreuther, eds., Visions of the Future in Germany and America (Oxford, 2001).

12. For Franklin’s infamous characterization of German immigrants as Palatine Boors, see his 1751 essay Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, IV (New Haven, Conn., 1961), 225–234. His May 9, 1753, letter to Peter Collinson in London was widely circulated among English luminaries and politicians; the letter specifically created the chimera of a German realm impervious to English cultural and linguistic influence: Few of their children in the Country learn English; they import many Books from Germany; and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English; They have one German News-paper, and one half German. Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. The Germans’ insistence on their language and the power of their printing presses thus made it almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain (477–486 [quotation on 484]). On Franklin’s attitude toward the Germans and the Charity School movement, see Patrick M. Erben, Educating Germans in Colonial Pennsylvania, in John Pollack, ed., The Good Education of Youth: Worlds of Learning in the Age of Franklin (Newcastle, Del., 2009), 122–149. For scholarship perpetuating Franklin’s notions of German immigrant isolationism in early Pennsylvania, see Ralph Frasca, ‘To Rescue the Germans Out of Sauer’s Hands’: Benjamin Franklin’s German-Language Printing Partnerships, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, CXXI (1997), 350; and Sally Schwartz, A Mixed Multitude: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, 1987), 10.

For more recent scholarship on cross-cultural group contact, especially in colonial Pennsylvania, see Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford, 2009); William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, eds., Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (University Park, Pa., 2004); A. G. Roeber, Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America (University Park, Pa., 2008); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008); John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 2010). Excellent examples of scholarship focusing on the work of linguistic mediators and translingual contact are James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, 1999); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003).

13. For an innovative approach that considers translation as a prism revealing the multiplicity of meanings, especially as applied to the Moravian translations into native American languages, see Julie Tomberlin Weber, Translation as a Prism: Broadening the Spectrum of Eighteenth-Century Identity, in Roeber, ed., Ethnographies and Exchanges, 195–207.

Chapter One

Reversing the Heritage of Babel

VISIONS OF RELIGIOUS AND LINGUISTIC RENEWAL IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE

The early modern age was marked by an intense occupation with a variety of linguistic reform movements, such as the search for a perfect, universal, or original tongue. Most endeavors to change the religious and spiritual disposition of European society during this period were tied to designs to reform human communication, especially the problems of linguistic multiplicity and the declivity between human languages and divine truth. Ranging from the universal language championed